Drobo BeyondRAID

Drobo is a company that has leaned in the storage solutions market for companies and domestic installations with devices that reflect the NAS on the market in the form and size, but not the approach to the base tied to traditional RAID configurations. In place of these, which vary depending on the number of hard drives available and preferences between speed performance and data redundancy, Drobo uses BeyondRAID technology.

This name identifies the proprietary technology that allows Drobo, with all devices company and therefore regardless of the number of hard drives present, digestire more flexibly available storage space of overcoming some of the limitations of their Raid technologies. E ‘for example can remove and insert hard drives in the device even when powered on, or mix hard drives of different capacities and technology (SATA or SAS, for example). The approach taken by the company is to ensure the benefits of RAID technologies without having to manage the complexity and the limits in terms of configuration mode.

Once installed hard drives within a Drobo model of the LEDs identifying the status of each storage unit: green to indicate an operation that is stable and correct; yellow for hard drives that need to be replaced with others of higher capacity and red for devices that need to be changed because it no longer functioning properly. A visual approach of this kind is simple and intuitive for any user, especially thinking about those who have no experience in Raid mode configuration.

In case of malfunction of one of the hard drives in the drive Drobo data is automatically reconfigured among other hard drives present, leaving the user the only task of replacing the damaged disc with another working. At a time when you need more storage capacity the only thing to do is to replace hard drives with smaller ones of larger capacity, letting Drobo to automatically redistribute data between units available to maximize the capacity of each. Raid configurations with the increase of storage space typically requires the purchase of all new hard drives and their gradual upgrade, paying attention to the fact that hard drives are all the same.

To increase the speed performance, with models that can accommodate a large number of hard drives, simply enter one or more SSDs operated as speeding cache memory read and write data to and from the hard drive. The inclusion of an SSD is obviously linked to the type of use that is made of Drobo: useful when you have data that is read and written in a continuous manner, for example less if Drobo is used as a storage unit to access the content playback multimedia.

The solutions that Drobo offers on the market are different, depending on the targets of use and the number of hard disk drives that can be installed. Units Drobo Mini and Drobo Drobo 5D are developed on the needs of individual users, with storage space for 4 or 5 hard drives depending on the model and USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt. The models, and Drobo Drobo 5N B810N integrated Ethernet interface, designed for installation in a local network such as NAS: accept respectively 5:08 hard disk. Closing models Drobo and Drobo B810i B1200i with 8:12 HDD, Gigabit Ethernet interfaces and iSCSI SAN technology to use such solutions.

The Drobo solutions are available on the Italian market but with a distribution that is not through an official national sales channel; over the next few months, however, the company will begin distributing in Italy making these proposals easily purchased and used as an alternative to other proposals for storage developed for home users, professionals and small-medium businesses.